Page 166 of Crossed Wires: The Complete Series

Harper looked at him. “Up I go where?”

He nodded toward the empty pickup bed. “In the back.”

“I—”

He moved before she knew what he was doing, placing one open hand on her butt, the other around her upper arm. “In we go.”

Harper let out a yelp at his unexpected shove on her assandher unexpected momentum upward. Her brain—stunned senseless for a split second—scrambled into gear and, with a laugh she also hadn’t expected, she tumbled into the back of the pickup.

“All right, Blue,” Marc called as he lobbed himself into the truck bed beside Harper. “Let’s go.”

The engine started with a deafening growl and as the pickup shot forward, propelling Harper backward onto her ass, squeals of delight burst past her lips.

Watch out, living. Here I come.

Keith shot his rearview mirror a quick look, his chest tight. Harper clung to the side of the ute’s tray, her smile stunning, her hair whipping about her head like strands of spun gold.

Fuck, she was beautiful.

Gone was the polished, all-in-black city woman he’d first laid eyes on two days ago. Today she was dressed in faded jeans and a loose white shirt left unbuttoned over a pale-pink tank. The outfit was simple and pretty—and made the way his body was responding all the more confusing.

He’d understood the purely sexual reaction when she’d first arrived on Farpoint. Hell, how could a bloke with a working dicknotbe turned-on by the way she’d looked on Saturday? He’d understood the undeniable lust surging through him when he and Thomo found her naked in her bedroom. He’d never been immune to a naked woman, especially one who looked as though she should grace the cover ofSports Illustratedin a bikini.

But the Harper in the back now, the one who looked sweet and innocent and very feminine…

Christ, his dick was so damn hard it was a wonder there was any blood left in his brain to drive.

When was the last time he’d been turned on by a sweet, innocent anything?

He flicked a look at Marc, who sat beside the American. The wind tugged at his shirt, giving Keith flashes of the tattoo on Marc’s chest. He’d been with the stupid bastard when Marc had gotten the tat. Paid for it, in fact, when Marc realized he’d left his wallet back at Cobar’s main pub.

It seemed Thomo was just as taken by Harper Shaw as Keith was.

The idea made his already throbbing cock throb harder.

He didn’t allow himself to think too much about that. In fact, he’d refused to think about Harper and her effect on his body since he’d kissed her.

Okay, that was bullshit. He’d jerked off the last couple nights to the thought of that kiss, keeping his actions clandestine. Thomo slept in the room next to his. The walls of the hired hands’ houses weren’t exactly soundproof and Keith didn’t want his mate, or the two new young jackaroos in the room on his other side, to hear him.

He didn’t consider himself the kind of man who took pleasure in the body of a woman he’d barely met. That wasn’t the kind of man his parents had raised him to be. His dad—Cobar’s police sergeant—saw firsthand how poorly a lot of women in the Outback were treated and certainly expected better of his son.

Life in the Outback wasn’t easy for anyone. It turned boys to men quickly. It turned men hard equally fast. Could turn them into bastards if they weren’t careful. Keith knew that all too well. He’d watched his uncle, Farpoint’s one-time horse-breaker, become bitter and violent and contemptuous. Had bore witness when his father had come to Farpoint thirteen years ago and arrested his own kid brother, Keith’s uncle, for domestic violence.

His dad had hated to do it, hated even more that Keith—who lived on the station with his mother, the station’s resident cook—had seen it all. The violence, the rage, the impotent self-hate.

For Keith, a young boy of fifteen, it had been a brutal lesson.

Nothing sweet or innocent belonged in the Outback.

And yet, here was Harper Shaw, looking sweet and pretty and innocent and so bloody feminine he could barely breathe.

No wonder he was messed up.

He looked at Marc in the rearview mirror again, the young man’s cheeky grin sending a tight, indefinable shard through Keith’s chest.

Marc was his best mate. They did everything together.

As if aware of his gaze, Marc swung his attention to the ute’s rearview mirror, his stare connecting with Keith’s in the glass.